WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP: ELDER CARE
Six Years Ago, We Set
Out to Create a Law
Firm Where Things
Work Differently
Delfino Madden is a majority women-owned law firm. Pictured are partners Corinne H. Gartner,
Monica Hans Folsom, Shaye Schrick, Jennifer Randlett Madden, and Elizabeth Leet Jackson.
With a foundation formed from our enjoyment of
working together, we built a firm around our
passion for helping clients succeed.
As our firm grew, we realized we had a lot of women
leading the charge. More than 1/2 of our partners and
2/3 of our lawyers are women—numbers almost
unheard of in traditional law firms.
Our partners are equity owners—business owners who
shoulder challenges and share successes. Whatever
type of organization we represent—a corporation, a
nonprofit or a university system—our lawyers
understand business, because we built one.
delfinomadden.com
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comstocksmag.com | March 2020
Several Democratic candidates
for president have advocated for
improved early childhood policies.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren,
for example, has proposed spending
more than $1 trillion on a national
child care system, and Vermont Sen.
Bernie Sanders sponsored the Foun-
dations for Success Act in 2011, which
would have provided all prekindergar-
ten children with access to full-time
care and education. It languished in
committee and was never passed. The
U.S. offers government subsidies for
child care for poorer families, but only
one in nine of the 2 million children
eligible in California received services
in 2017, due to a lack of available spac-
es, according to the California Budget
& Policy Center.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom made
funding and subsidizing preschool
and child care facilities a priority in his
2019-20 budget, including $300 million
for full-day kindergarten facilities and
addressing barriers to full-day kin-
dergarten programs; $263 million for
early learning and care facilities; and
$195 million for education, training,
grants and other workforce support. But
the budget did not include funding to
expand access to subsidized programs
for children from low- and moderate-in-
come families, despite the hundreds of
thousands of parents in these income
brackets who have been waiting for years
to gain access to a child care program.
“Not only am I trying to do my job,
trying to juggle health insurance, trying
to put dinner on the table every night,
and make sure my kids are dressed
every morning and up in time to go to
whoever is watching them,” Candelaria
says, “then I’m trying to be their health
care advocate, remembering their
six-month dental checkups and trying
to take the time off work to get them
there, but also make sure I have enough
vacation time left so that we can have a
family holiday. It’s a lot.”
Robin Epley is the editor of the Fort
Bragg Advocate-News and Mendocino
Beacon and a native of Sacramento.